Caceres freely admits that malicious hackers could use PunkSpider to identify websites to hack. But he argues that scanners that find web vulnerabilities have always existed. This one just makes the results public. “You know your customers can see it, your investors can see it, so you’re going to fix that shit fast,” says Caceres. […]
This week, Venmo took a long overdue step toward privacy by eliminating its global social feed in its latest redesign. That’s good! Now you can no longer witness an endless stream of complete strangers sending money to and from one another. But privacy advocates say that until Venmo makes every transaction private by default, it’s […]
Regulators in Germany are poised to block one of the world’s biggest porn sites, according to a report from our colleagues at WIRED UK. The country imposed age verification checks for adult sites recently, which some have yet to implement. The blocking would have to be carried out by ISPs and mobile data providers, who […]
Biometric authentication is a key piece of the tech industry’s plans to make the world password-less. But a new method for duping Microsoft’s Windows Hello facial-recognition system shows that a little hardware fiddling can trick the system into unlocking when it shouldn’t. Services like Apple’s FaceID have made facial-recognition authentication more commonplace in recent years, […]
If you’re a member of the US military who’s gotten friendly Facebook messages from private-sector recruiters for months on end, suggesting a lucrative future in the aerospace or defense contractor industry, Facebook may have some bad news. On Thursday, the social media giant revealed that it has tracked and at least partially disrupted a long-running […]
The ubiquitous end-to-end encrypted messaging service WhatsApp melds security and convenience for 2 billion people around the world. But there’s always been a big limitation: The service relies entirely on your smartphone. You can use your account on desktops or through the web, but you’re really just interacting with a mirror of what’s on your […]
German child-protection regulators are on the verge of blocking one of the world’s largest pornographic websites. The officials are set to issue a blocking order to the country’s biggest internet service providers saying a pornographic website, believed to be xHamster, should be made inaccessible to Germany’s 83 million people. The blocking order, which may be […]
With protests erupting around Cuba on Sunday over the country’s economic crisis, food shortages, and Covid-19 infection spike, the island nation’s ruling party responded by blocking access to Facebook, WhatsApp, and other popular communication and social media platforms. It’s a measure that authoritarian governments have deployed repeatedly in recent years, a go-to tool for repressive […]
The security woes of pro-Trump social media sites have been a theme of 2021: First, an absurdly basic bug in Parler allowed all of its posts to be scraped in the hours before it was dropped by its hosting provider and went offline. Then Gab was breached by hackers who stole and leaked 40 million […]
Each day, a team of analysts in the UK faces a seemingly endless mountain of horrors. The team of 21, who work at the Internet Watch Foundation’s office in Cambridgeshire, spend hours trawling through images and videos containing child sexual abuse. And, each time they find a photo or piece of footage it needs to […]